Brain Hacks: Everyday Mind Magic for Creating the Life You Want

By Keith Barry

Keith Barry is the world's leading TV Hypnotist, Mentalist And Brain Hacker. He has mastered the unique ability to hack into people's minds and rewire their subconscious.
In this groundbreaking book, Keith reveals how, over the course of his astonishing career, he has developed a variety of techniques that will help you to cultivate a 'magical mindset' and develop mental toughness subconsciously. These are the very techniques he uses every day to achieve the life of his dreams.
If you feel you are stuck in a rut or need help in life – whether that's with your career, your finances, your personal life or anything else – this book will help you to move forward. When you master these methods, you too will discover that anything is possible when you put your mind to it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780717191918

Keith Barry

Keith Barry is a world-renowned brain hacker and mentalist. His bestselling book, Brain Hacks, was published in 2021 by Gill Books. His skills have been showcased in over 40 international television shows and his TED Talk 'Brain Magic' has amassed almost 19 million views worldwide. He works regularly with international sports stars and celebrities to help them achieve peak performance.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK HAS THE POWER to transform your life. Within these pages are techniques and methods I have developed and refined over the past three decades that will help you transform the areas of your life that need to be transformed. It doesn’t matter where you live, what age you are, whether you’re in a relationship or not, whether you are currently employed or not, or whether you are rich or poor. I know these systems work and I know these techniques can transform your life forever.

I have used these techniques to inspire thousands of people all over the world to dig themselves out of whatever hole they were in, and kickstart a brand-new and totally improved life. I live by the philosophies and techniques in this book. Included are examples from my own life, some of them inspiring, some of them painful. They are there so that you can understand how success can be achieved and problems can be overcome by anybody.

Although I am a magician, among other things, this book comes with a warning. If you are expecting a wave from a magic wand to make you healthy, wealthy and famous, then this book is not for you.

As well as being a magician, however, I am also a husband, a father, a scientist, a mentalist, a hypnotist, an escapologist, a businessman, a mind coach, and a brain hacker. I have written the book so that my hacks and visualisations are easy to understand and can be used by a reader of any age or background.

I’ve used these hacks and techniques on sportspeople from Olympians to international rugby players. I’ve used them on ordinary people in all walks of life and even Hollywood A-listers. I’ve helped well-known businesspeople and celebrities. While I don’t pretend to have all the answers to all of the issues people face on a daily basis, I do believe I have a lot of tips and techniques that will help you in any walk of life.

If you’ve become one of those people who have an on-off relationship with the self-help section of your local bookstore, then you can finally stop spending your time standing with your head tilted at an angle, scanning the spines of books that may or may not help you achieve what you want to achieve in your life. You can stop picking them up, flicking through the pages for headlines or chapters that seem relevant to your life and your problems.

You can stop reading the backs of the books to see who the author is and what, if anything, anyone has to say about their methods. Finally, you can stop glancing at the price tag in the bottom corner of the book before deciding you can’t really afford to buy it, only to go out and spend the same amount on something else you don’t really need. Ask yourself these questions.

  Why do you need to go to the self-help section of the store?

  Why did you pick up this book?

  Why are you reading this page?

The answer to all of these questions is simple, whether you know it consciously or not; you need, and want, to make changes in your life. These may be small changes, like getting over a fear of dogs, or bigger changes involving starting a totally new career or finding some way to pay your mortgage so that you don’t end up in arrears.

The fact is that if you feel you are stuck in any sort of a rut or need help in life – whether that’s in your home life, your career, your finances, your love life, your state of health, your social life or anything else – this book will help you move forward. I know because the hacks and visualisations contained in these pages are the very ones I continue to use daily in my own life.

You have the ability to attain the mindset you desire and change your life for the better, regardless of your circumstances. If you are ready to achieve a ‘magical mindset’ by not just reading this book, but by studying, applying, and repeating these hacks on a daily basis, then this book may just change your life forever. Read, study, learn, repeat, and live a magical life.

How to use this book

As well as stories from my own life, in each section there are moments where you will be urged to put the book down for a while and focus your attention on what it is you are really trying to achieve and how best to move forward. To do this properly and help you keep you on top of your ideas, your targets and your progress, I suggest you keep a journal. This should be an expensive leather-bound journal or at the very least a good hardback copybook. Just keep it handy and use it regularly.

This book is divided into nine sections: Confidence, Risk, Creativity, Success, Resilience, Positivity, Influence, Deception and A Magical Mind. While it’s probably best to read this book from beginning to end, it is written in such a way that you can skip to the relevant section that you need most. At the end of each section, there is a short list of everyday brain hacks, which can be used as reminders to help you get back on track quickly, and a tailored visualisation pertaining to the section topic. To complement these written visualisations, you can also hear an audio version of each one by visiting www.keithbarry.com/brainhacks and entering the password BRAINHACKS21. (There are also some pretty cool mentalism tricks in these pages that you can use to astound your friends and family. To complement these tricks, you can also watch a tutorial of each one on my website.)

Don’t worry if you find it strange at first, or even feel a bit daft doing it. We all feel a little out of our depth the first time we try anything. But if you stick with it and keep practising for at least 21 days, these visualisations have the power to transform your life.

In one of the first experiments on visualisation, in 1967, Australian psychologist Alan Richardson visited a team of college basketball players and recorded each player’s accuracy as they took free throw shots. He then split them into three groups for a month-long experiment. In the first group, students practised free throw shots for an hour every day. Instead of practising, though, the students in the second group were told to just visualise themselves making free throws instead. They were told to make the experience as realistic as possible. They were told to see the court and its surroundings, to feel the weight and texture of the ball in their hands, hear the sound of it bouncing off the floor, see the flight of the ball in the air and hear the swoosh of the net as it went in. Those in the third group were told not to play basketball for a month.

At the end of the month, all three groups were tested to check if they had improved. While the third group, who had done absolutely nothing, had shown no signs of improvement, the first group, who had physically practised, had improved their initial scores by 24 per cent. The biggest surprise, however, was the fact that the second group had improved by 23 per cent, even though all they had done was visualise themselves taking those shots.¹

Since then, studies have shown that your brain doesn’t know the difference between deep, clear, vivid visualisation of an action and actually undertaking the physical action itself.² If you visualise yourself achieving something you set out to achieve, then your brain thinks you have already done it and therefore believes that you can. Visualisation has become an important tool in achieving success for many people from all walks of life, including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

‘I visualised myself being, and having, what it was I wanted,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Before I won my first Mr. Universe title, I walked around the tournament like I owned it. I had won it so many times in my mind that there was no doubt I would win it. Then when I moved on to the movies, the same thing. I visualised myself being a famous actor and earning big money. I just knew it would happen.’ If you’re a football fan, you may know that, as I write, Wayne Rooney is currently the record goal scorer for Manchester United, with 253 goals. What you may not know, however, is that Rooney visualised himself scoring those goals the night before every game. After finding out what colour jerseys, shorts and socks his team would be wearing the next day, so that his mental imagery would be more colourful and realistic, Rooney would lie on his bed and imagine the scene. He could hear the crowd, feel the grass under his feet, feel the touch of the ball on his boots and sense the atmosphere in the stadium before visualising himself scoring and playing well. ‘I lie in bed the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well,’ he once explained of his visualisation technique. ‘You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a memory before the game.’

But visualisation is not just for artists, sports stars or celebrities. I use it every single day of my life and you can use it too. Every single thing I have achieved in my life, from headlining in Las Vegas to writing this book right now, is a direct result of deep, repetitive visualisation.

CONFIDENCE

the ability to deceive yourself to believe in yourself

‘I learned early on as an actor that confidence can be faked. If people feel you’re confident, then they’re confident.’ – George Clooney

1.

FROM THE CRADLE

TO THE STAGE

THE ROCKY ROAD TO CONFIDENCE

HERE’S A LITTLE SECRET. Nobody is born with confidence. In the same way that you are not born with the ability to ride a bicycle, drive a golf ball onto a fairway or drive a car, you are not born with confidence.

Confidence is a trait or skill you pick up and learn as you go through life. The amount of confidence you have at this moment in time has been influenced by your experiences in life so far. People who lack confidence have, unfortunately for them, had their abilities, their looks, their thoughts and their ideas put down and knocked over time by teachers, coaches, schoolmates, peers, strangers or even friends and family. So those doubts you have in your mind that you ‘can’t do that’, you’re ‘not good enough’, ‘not beautiful enough’, ‘not tall enough’, ‘not skinny enough’, ‘not intelligent enough’ and everything in between have all been learned.

Confidence is like a brick wall. Every snide remark, every put-down and every bad online interaction can chip away at the mortar, dislodge the bricks, or even knock the whole wall down altogether.

Often unintentionally, some of this chipping and dislodging of bricks can come from our parents or siblings. Our brains are like sponges. Information from all kinds of sources drips onto that sponge daily and everything, both the good and the bad, gets soaked up. If you are constantly being drip-fed the idea that you can’t do something, or that you are stupid or somehow less important than anybody else in the room, then you are eventually going to believe that. Consequently, you will have little or no confidence in yourself.

I was lucky enough to have very supportive parents and a pretty idyllic childhood, but I’ve also had my own confidence knocked on more than one occasion. My sister, Michele, and I had a great upbringing on the outskirts of Waterford City in the south of Ireland. We lived about six kilometres from the city centre, down a dark country road surrounded by fields in a then-rural area named Williamstown. Further out the road there were quite a few big houses built by doctors, lawyers and businessmen, earning the road the nickname Millionaire’s Row – but we lived in a modest three-bedroom bungalow with a decent-sized garden situated next door to my mother’s parents.

My grandfather, or ‘Gaga’, as we called him, grew his own vegetables, and worked on the land for various neighbours. He was also the only person in my family who ever showed me a magic trick. When I was very small, he used to do a trick with a piece of twine that involved putting it in his mouth, tying the middle of it to his finger, which touched his nose, and then pulling it through his finger with his other hand. I’ve only remembered him doing this recently but maybe subconsciously that little trick – which I still don’t know how to do – sparked my initial interest in magic.

When I was old enough to begin my education, my primary school was just a short walk across the fields behind our back garden. My mother and I used to hop the ditch every morning to begin the journey. On the way, we would pass cattle and sheep, and in spring it wasn’t uncommon to have witnessed a calf, foal or lamb being born before I sat down at my school desk.

Waterpark Junior School was an all-boys’ school, and was quite strict. While corporal punishment was banned in 1982, it was 1996 before it was made a criminal offence, so sometimes crude ways of ‘enhancing our knowledge’ were used, like the ‘splinter stick’ and knuckle raps to your temple if you got something wrong or weren’t paying attention. Having those things done to me in front of my friends didn’t do much to instil confidence in my ability to learn.

The school was also quite posh, and we actually had elocution lessons most days. At the time, there didn’t seem much point to me in standing up and rhyming off, ‘How, now, brown cow,’ and various other sentences, but in hindsight it probably helped me in the business I ended up going into. Apart from that, school in general was pretty enjoyable in those early years and I had a large group of school friends. We played outdoors together in all weathers after school.

As a child I had two main interests. I loved animals and I loved magic. One of the biggest TV shows of the time was The Paul Daniels Magic Show on BBC. With just three or four channels to choose from, Paul Daniels’ show was great family entertainment and was a staple of my Saturday evening routine for most of its fifteen-year duration.

At the age of five, I got a Paul Daniels Magic Set for Christmas. My first trick involved placing a ball under a cup, lifting the cup to reveal that the ball had disappeared and then, to the amazement of my audience – usually my parents and my sister – lifting it again to make the ball reappear. Once I had mastered this simple ready-made trick, I began to show it to various members of my extended family and delighted in the response that I got for my efforts.

My parents saw how much joy I got out of that little magic set, and Santa must have noticed too, because every year after that I would get a magic set for Christmas and my birthday. As I got older and the tricks became bigger and more elaborate, I revelled in the notion that I could completely fool and astound an ever-widening circle of family, friends, classmates, teachers and even complete strangers with a simple magic trick.

Although the world becomes a much more cynical place as we grow into adulthood, magic always brings me back to that childhood delight, that feeling I got and still get to this day, from seeing grown men and women stunned and amazed at little tricks like a handkerchief or a card vanishing in front of their eyes. I found that performing magic for friends and family was an amazing way to develop confidence at a young age. Magic gave me a belief in myself that I’m not sure I would have had if I hadn’t discovered my passion so early in life.

A move to the Christian Brothers-run Mount Sion school in the city centre, however, jolted me out of my happy-go-lucky prepubescent existence. I immediately struggled to fit into Mount Sion, but the one good thing about it for me was that my dad’s childhood home was five minutes away and I got to spend every lunchtime with my grandparents Paddy and Nancy. My grandfather worked in the local post office and my grandmother was a fantastic cook, baker and mentor. She was also decades ahead of her time, practising yoga and meditation before they were even on the radar in Ireland. If she were alive today, I’m sure the modern term for her would be ‘thought leader’. My daily lunchtime visits saw me build a really great bond with both of them as I grew up.

Most of the kids who went to Mount Sion lived nearby, in the city centre, so I was seen as an outsider. Not only an outsider but a posh outsider. Unlike them, I called my mother ‘mum’ instead of ‘mam’ or ‘ma’, and as far as they were concerned, I was from Millionaire’s Row and was a spoilt little rich kid and a target for their bullying – which often left me hobbling around school with dead legs, bruised arms or chewing gum in my hair.

In an effort to avoid the bullies, I tried changing my accent for a while, but my mother was having none of it at home, so I was a bit confused as to what to do. At the time, I was a pretty solid defender for football club Johnville FC, but after a year or so in secondary school, in an attempt to build up my confidence and face up to the bullies, I stopped playing football to take up Taekwondo with two of my few friends from Mount Sion, Cian Foley and David Burke.

I really got stuck into Taekwondo and, after a few years, had moved up to black tag, one grade away from black belt. But I never got my black belt. I stopped for two reasons: the fact that we trained outside and had been doing inclined press-ups on our knuckles on corrugated concrete (which wasn’t great for my long-term hand dexterity if I was to continue doing magic); and the fact that we started learning full-contact street-fight-style Taekwondo.

I remember sparring one day and getting kicked in the groin. Now, I had a protective cup on, but it was still sore and there were tears. As I welled up, the adult I was sparring with punched me in the nose and kicked me in the groin again. I fell to the ground as he shouted repeatedly at me to ‘Get UP!’ and continued kicking me.

As I lay there, defenceless, one of the older guys in the class, a six-foot-six behemoth who has since sadly passed away, came over and tried to get my sparring partner off me. When he repeatedly told the man to stop kicking me, his response was to keep on kicking me as he told my saviour, ‘If he’s on the ground outside a nightclub, they’re going to keep kicking him!’

When he eventually pulled the man off me, and I dragged myself to my feet, I began to have second thoughts about Taekwondo. I realised I was dealing with enough bullies in school without having to deal with a fully grown adult bully and I quit the club. Having begun to build my confidence through the sport, my last experience of Taekwondo left me feeling even more vulnerable than before I started.

STOP GIVING ENERGY TO PEOPLE WHO KNOCK YOUR CONFIDENCE

Even if you manage to get through school relatively unscathed, college or employment can bring a whole new set of people armed with chisels who add to that chipping and stripping away of your wall of confidence. After a while you begin to doubt yourself. You tell yourself, and even other people, that you are shy, an introvert. But shyness is just a word for not expressing yourself because you’re unsure, you don’t want to feel silly, stupid or inadequate. Thalia Eley, professor of developmental behavioural genetics at King’s College London, says shyness is only around 30 per cent genetic and that 70 per cent comes from your reaction to your environment. Being shy at a young age can come from domineering parents, coaches, teachers, bullies, or others who won’t let you have an opinion.

If you are over eighteen and are reading this book, though, then you need to realise that you are no longer a child who can be told to stay quiet or persuaded that you will never amount to anything. You are an adult and now is the time to accept responsibility for how you react to your environment. You can’t continue to spend your life trapped in a web of anxiety and shyness. You must take responsibility. It’s time to be yourself and stop blaming others.

If people around you are constantly knocking your confidence, then the first thing you must do is use the word ‘stop’. You need to actually tell whoever it is to stop doing or saying whatever it is that is making you feel uncomfortable or damaging your confidence. If they don’t stop then you need to either phase their opinions out of your life or phase those people out of your life and stop giving them your energy. You need to show them and, more importantly, yourself that you have matured, moved on and taken charge of your own mind.

Now, you might say something like ‘I don’t like confrontation. I can’t phase them out.’ Well, nobody in their right mind likes confrontation. The only people who like confrontation are bullies – and very often those bullies don’t realise they are bullies and don’t realise the harm that they have done.

On rare occasions, I still bump into the bullies from my old school. Often, they’ll come up to me and say how great it is to see me doing so well. As they speak to me, in my head I want to attack them, pay them back for their misdeeds, but, of course, that is not the correct response. I know the right thing to do is simply to continuously phase them out. As an adult you have to start to forget bullies. You have to get to a point where you no longer give those people energy. You need to stop their thought process interfering with yours.

As a thirteen-year-old, I still practised magic almost every day, but career-wise I wanted to be a vet and spent the summer of my first year in secondary school helping the local vet, Ken Kiersey. Ken was a farm vet, which often meant helping him inject cattle, and I even had to put my hand up the rear end of a cow once in a while. I’d come home covered in cow dung most days and my mother wouldn’t let me into the house until I’d stripped off my work clothes, but I absolutely loved it and worked with Ken for a couple of summers in an effort to get some experience of what it would be like if and when I got my dream job in the future.

At 14, I got my first ever paid magic show, a kids’ party for families of the employees of Kromberg & Schubert in the old Ard Rí Hotel up on the hill in Waterford City. My uncle Brendan had got the gig for me. I had taught myself a show and had rehearsed it over and over at home. Doing it at home, though, and doing it in front of a hundred crazy screaming kids was a completely different ball game.

The whole way through my act, my hands would not stop shaking. I could actually feel and see them shaking but I couldn’t stop them. I could barely pick up my props and the kids basically tore me apart for an hour. Every trick I did they would scream, ‘It’s up your sleeve,’ or ‘It’s in your pocket,’ or whatever else they could throw at me. They even grabbed my props and pulled my pockets inside out.

Although I got paid a small fee for the experience, I was a bit the worse for wear afterwards and my confidence in my ability as a magician had taken a really good battering. My mother could see from my body language as I slumped into the car that the show hadn’t gone well and by the time we reached my grandmother Nancy’s house I hadn’t spoken more than a couple of words.

Always a very positive woman, Nancy tried to boost my spirits by telling me that she knew a magician who could give me some advice. Full of enthusiasm, she picked up the phone and called him right there and then.

‘My grandson is a magician and I’m just wondering if you could give him some advice?’

‘Sure,’ came the reply and she handed the phone to me.

Excitedly, I began with ‘Hi, how are you? I’d just really like to learn some ...’

He stopped me mid-sentence with just four words.

‘It’s a closed shop!’

‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ I asked innocently.

‘Magic! It’s a closed shop!’ he repeated and hung up. That was it, the only advice I had ever had from a real magician. The combination of a very shaky first show and the lack of empathy from someone who had been there and bought the T-shirt, someone I aspired to be like, left me running really low on confidence for a long time after.

Slowly, over time, I realised the best reaction to people who knock you is no reaction at all. Give them and their thoughts no energy whatsoever. None. Zero. Zilch.

Constantly absorbing this negativity will become deeply ingrained within the neuro-circuitry of your brain and drag your confidence down. To eliminate this negativity you must immediately focus on your confidence wall. Instead of the negative comment chipping away at your wall, imagine yourself putting another brick into or on top of the wall. Add some mortar and smile internally because the person’s negativity is actually helping you build even greater confidence.

Years later I became friendly with the magician who fobbed me off when he saw me in the newspapers and made contact, but I’ll never forget that day and how I felt after it. It’s something I’ve learned from, and I currently mentor a couple of young Irish magicians, Aidan McCann and Daniel Cremin.

When I told Nancy the details about my disastrous first show and that I thought maybe I wasn’t good enough to be a magician, she gave me my first lesson in reality with the words ‘Well, that’s life, Keith. Sometimes things don’t go as well as you’d planned. We all find ourselves in situations where we feel out of our depth or that we don’t deserve to be there, but the thing you need to learn is that everybody feels like an impostor sometimes. The trick is to never give up and to keep doing the things you love until you realise you are as good as anybody else.’

WE ARE ALL IMPOSTORS

At the time, I had never heard of the term ‘impostor syndrome’, and I’m sure my grandmother never had either. In the decades that have passed since those words of advice from my grandmother, I have come to realise that absolutely everyone suffers from impostor syndrome at some point in their lives. Impostor syndrome is that feeling that you don’t belong in a certain environment or situation, that you’re not good enough to be there, don’t deserve to be there. It’s that feeling you get when you don’t believe in your own abilities.

The term was first coined in 1978 by Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes after a study into highly successful women who, despite earning degrees, passing tests, and being formally recognised by their colleagues as excellent professionals, believed they were inadequate or incompetent and attributed their successes to luck.³

In the 1980s further research suggested that seventy per cent of all people feel like fakes or frauds at some point.⁴ In my experience, I’ve found the figure to be much higher.

Every single one of the athletes, businesspeople and entertainers I have worked with as a mind coach over the years has the same reaction when I reveal this simple fact to them. Invariably, they reply with a huge sigh of relief, ‘Oh my God, so it’s not just me!’

Society often dictates that we are all at different levels socially, which means people often feel they are less than the person they are dealing with, whether that’s their boss or their colleagues, friends or neighbours. The reality is that many people inherit and gain positions, possessions and power based on